Pictures: Ancient Egyptian Artifacts Damaged in Looting

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Pictures: Ancient Egyptian Artifacts Damaged in Looting

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Egyptian Museum

Tanks roll into Tahrir Square outside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo on Sunday, January 30, 2011. During the chaotic protests two nights before, would-be looters broke into the 108-year-old building through a skylight, according to official reports. The vandals damaged mummies and artifacts but were arrested before they could make off with anything.

Pictured in 1963, a 14th-century B.C. statuette from King Tut's tomb shows the young pharaoh balanced on the back of a leopard. One of a matched pair, the sculpture was reportedly damaged in the weekend attack on the Egyptian Museum.

In a gallery displaying King Tut's 3,300-year-old chariots, a member of the Egyptian special forces stands guard near a case allegedly smashed by looters this past weekend. Pieces of the pharaoh's damaged ceremonial fan of gold lie on top of the glass.

Looters in the Egyptian Museum reportedly damaged 4,000-year-old models that represent an army of Nubian archers (shown intact in a file picture). Standing about 21 inches (53 centimeters) tall, the statues were discovered in 1894 in the tomb of a prince in the town of Assiut.

Photograph by Kenneth Garrett, National Geographic

City of the Dead

In the region around this 4,500-year-old tomb of an official at Abusir (pictured in an undated photo), looters allegedly broke into excavation warehouses filled with artifacts this past weekend.

Egypt's museums are so full of ancient treasures that many excavated objects are stored near the sites where they were found. In peaceful times a padlocked door, lead seals marked with an inspector's stamp, and a guard are enough to keep them safe.

Photograph by Werner Forman, Corbis

Face in the Crowd

Shown in an undated picture, crowds throng King Tut's golden funerary mask in the Egyptian Museum. The iconic piece was not among the damaged artifacts.

"A lot of the things that were broken off were gilded wood, so I think [the looters] were after gold," UCLA Egyptologist Willeke Wendrich told National Geographic News.

"The restoration of those objects, even if all the parts are still there, will be very difficult, time consuming, and costly," she added. "This is really fragile wood."